Thoughts? I am currently trying to avoid using plastic packed drinks as much as possible due to it’s limited and finite recycle count
FYI; cans are plastic lined.
It’s true, but the amount of plastic in the cans is pretty negligible, especially compared to plastic bottles and the aluminum can is still by far the most recyclable beverage container.
Also there are new linings that don’t use plastic but natural materials called oleoresinous linings but they’re not good for acidic things so they’re not very wildly used.
he aluminum can is still by far the most recyclable beverage container.
Wouldn’t glass be more recyclable?
TIL. Do you know when that started?
Always. We used steel before then because it wouldn’t react with the drink. We always knew aluminum cans would be cheaper, but couldn’t figure out how to protect the flavor and carbonation until Coors figured out how to line it with plastic. He shared the process for free with his competition because he knew a recycling program would scale really well.
That’s not entirely true. In the early days they used wax to line the cans because steel still leaves a taste in the drink. It just didn’t work very well and also caused carbonation issues as the CO2 diffused into the wax.
Wow, multiple TIL on this thread.
Hmm. I wonder if this is true for all the various other acidic canned products. I use cans heavily in my cooking, so this is worrisome. Would the old Shackleton cans be wax-lined?
Glass is an option, or course, which is used in home canning.
Do you remember when Sun Chips changed their chip bag material to a more environmentally friendly compostable material? People lost their minds. Why? Because the bag crinkled a lot. All of the boring late night talk shows made fun of Sun Chips bags. So, they switched it back to the old bags.
Moral of the story is that people don’t care if something is better for the environment if it inconveniences them now. If everything was in cans people would cry because they can’t close them or whatever. In fact, many items that were previously sold in cans are now plastic. Also, money… Cheaper to wrap water in plastic.
You can still buy Coca-cola in glass bottles if you look hard enough. But they are pricey.
I got laughed at on other platforms by older generations for even suggesting the notion of mild inconvenience to make future generations lives easier.
They don’t want us or them to have a better life, not even if it costs them nothing - but ESPECIALLY not if they have to do literally anything differently.
The “fuck you I got mine” mindset. Sigh
“fuck you im gonna die before the ramifications for my actions harm anyone”
Has anyone ever said that to you?
It’s not exclusive to older generations unfortunately.
but so much worse when it comes from them. The “I got it, and I’ll never see what happens after I die so why do I care” attitude.
This is where I dispair about the future of walkable cities and trains. Can’t even get a section of the population to accept stopping to charge an EV every two hours for a whole 20 minutes during the road trip they take once a month, if that. How can we convince those people to bike or take trains?
I’ve given up trying to convince them. They’re a vocal minority. Who I talk to and work with are the quieter ones. I’ve found on posts and comment sections there are people who are asking honest questions and are receptive. Scroll past the chaff and you’ll find them. We have a new train opening in our city and I spent a couple hours explaining to people where parking was available, how to ride it, how to pay for fare, etc. People were genuinely excited to hear that people like me are riding it! A lot of it is just anxiety of never taking transit before, and not knowing how to get started.
Do you remember when Sun Chips changed their chip bag material to a more environmentally friendly compostable material? People lost their minds. Why? Because the bag crinkled a lot.
No… Because it crinkled at a high enough volume that you actually have to worry about hearing loss. People weren’t losing their mind for no reason.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703960004575427150103293906
It is louder than “the cockpit of my jet,” said J. Scot Heathman, an Air Force pilot, in a video probing the issue that he posted on his blog under the headline “Potato Chip Technology That Destroys Your Hearing.” Mr. Heathman tested the loudness using a RadioShack sound meter. He squeezed the bag and recorded a 95 decibel level.
The Bag was louder than the ambient noise in a jet fighter cockpit in flight.
Wow, that’s actually super interesting. Now I wish I had a bag to see how loud it sounds in person!
So just make aluminium bottles with a cap.
They already do in the US, they sell beer like this. And I’m pretty sure I’ve seen water packaged like this too.
Apparently aluminum is also heavier to ship.
Compared to barrels of crude oil, I am sure a SINGLE Block of Aluminium can be reused more than 1000X times with no environment damage.
Oh I’m sure you are right, it’s the drink companies for whom the shipping expense outweighs the environmental damage, because capitalism.
It’s also worth noting that transport does not have a zero cost on the environment. It’s why we did away with glass, it’s so heavy it actually becomes carbon intensive to transport. Especially when you account for greater spoilage percentages (due to the glass being mishandled and breaking more often than alternatives). The equation isn’t as simple as it would seem. The true solution is less likely single use drink containers of any kind and more likely some sort of reusable bottle you carry around with you and could fill up.
Capitalism could solve this no problem if we just taxed externalities. Don’t even have to hit every level of the supply chain, just a big tax on fossil carbon removed from the ground, and maybe another tax where it gets transformed into plastic (a sort of externality-added tax).
The market then decided what’s still worth making and what’s not, based on the total cost including the new taxes, weighed against how much people are willing to pay for the stuff.
I’m curious how much the environmental costs of shipping products in aluminum containers v. lighter plastic containers changes the equation.
I also tend to think that an even better solution would be to have the consumer be the one with the container, and shipping the product in bulk, to be dispensed as a bulk item at a retail location. E.g., the packaging for shipping is the tank that the truck is towing, rather than a trailer full of individual use bottles.
Besides convenience, I think a lot of container waste is also caused by our litigious society. If you pour milk into my container and I later sue you because it makes me sick, you might decide your best defense is to sell all milk in sealed containers. (And if someone poisons some containers, you’ll add tamper-proof layers.)
We don’t have Sun Chips here so I’m not aware of this, but I’d be really curious to learn how much of that freakout was genuine and how much was engineered by entities with a vested interest in maintaining status quo.
They were extremely loud. That doesn’t mean they should have stopped making them, but people aren’t joking about them being loud.
The bags were very noticeably louder and stiffer. Not enough that I would complain but it was something you noticed right away.
You would NOT want to have one in a movie theatre.
Certainly loud, but I think the way forward should have been engineering a quieter version instead of going back to plastic. And in the meantime use idk… a bowl?
Edit: use a bowl, meaning put the crisps in the bowl when you open them if the noise bothers you
Paper tubes like Pringles, maybe.
Bowls of chips don’t ship well or work well with shopping
Ssssss! We must make the humans use the bad Sun Chips bagssss!
— the entities
At the time, I thought the Sun chips bag situation was hilarious. If I think back on it now, it’s really sad. Yes, the bag was significantly louder than the original bag. But I feel like we’re going to need to make some sacrifices as a society for the environment. And that seems like a really, really tiny sacrifice.
Hearing loss is not an acceptable trade-off for a bag of chips.
It wasn’t that loud.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052748703960004575427150103293906
It is louder than “the cockpit of my jet,” said J. Scot Heathman, an Air Force pilot, in a video probing the issue that he posted on his blog under the headline “Potato Chip Technology That Destroys Your Hearing.” Mr. Heathman tested the loudness using a RadioShack sound meter. He squeezed the bag and recorded a 95 decibel level.
95 decibels is loud enough that you have to be concerned about hearing loss.
https://www.ncoa.org/adviser/hearing-aids/decibel-levels/
Prolonged exposure to sounds louder than 85 decibels can damage your hearing.
Sixty decibels is equal to the sound of normal conversation, 90 decibels is closer to a lawn mower or hair dryer, and 120 decibels is more like a siren on an emergency vehicle.From what distance away? Because I had them, and I promise they weren’t as loud from normal use distance than a jet engine. Maybe if your ear/microphone is basically touching the bag, but your ear isn’t normally that close. Plus, exposure time is pretty significant factor for hearing loss. Rolling up a chip bag once every couple of days when you have chips isn’t going to cause hearing loss.
Rolling up a chip bag once every couple of days when you have chips isn’t going to cause hearing loss.
Go look up a video of these bags. Mere handling them is loud as shit. Not just when you roll them up when you’re done.
NIOSH standards say that at 95db, you shouldn’t be exposed to more than ~45 minutes of it. Where-as an alternative “loud” bag was 77 db, which is longer than 50 hours of exposure (exceeds the rolling period and is thus “safe”).
Noise exposure is additive during a rolling period. So just saying “once every few days” is bullshit. This isn’t something that happens or can be in a vacuum. It’s adding to the total exposure that you’re exposed to every day. On top of the rest of your day the 95db chip bag is a really stupid fucking way to damage your hearing. Because you chose to eat some chips while watching a movie one night.
As someone with tinnitus… Fuck people who downplay hearing loss/damage. You should be doing everything possible to keep your exposure to anything above 80db to a minimum.
Moral of the story is that people don’t care if something is better for the environment if it inconveniences them now
Another way to put this is we all live in many different environments, including our clothes, room, home, neighborhood, etc
I would water the number one reason for not wanting the crinkle bags is to permit quiet night time snacking so as not to wake others in the house.
If you can, get Coca-Cola from Mexico. Its all glass and uses cane sugar.
Not that it isn’t still junk food and horrible for you. HFCS might be a worse form of sugar, but in the end they’re still refined sugars. It’s worth noting that Mexico and the US have similar obesity rates. There are more factors than just beverages involved, but it is one.
That sounds terrible!
One important thing to keep in mind that is that you cannot “just” make things from aluminium.
One reason the beverage can gets away with using so little alu for so much content is that that it’s pressurized and hence held in shape by its very content. This is why flat drinks have to have the extra air inside it be overpressurized and hence will stil fizz briefly when opened. And the shape of a bottle is not good for being held up by uniform pressure.
We can put non-pressurized things into it when either the content is light (cremes etc) or is in itself rather stable (powders). But even then we use a lot of metal for the container. To truly save, it needs to be something that pressurizes from the inside, which among other things can be inherently unsafe (spray cans come to mind, don’t puncture them).That’s nice but aluminum is not the only option.
There’s tin and glass that could be used for several things.
Aren’t aluminum cans still plastic bottles on the inside?
A standalone plastic bottle is 20-40g of PET.
The lining of a soda can is about 1g of BPA.
Yeah, but it is a lining. The entire interior surface is plastic, so is the risk of chemical leeching any different?
Yeah, you don’t get any aluminum leeched into your drink.
The BPA coating is what I’m referring to. A lot of people are not fond of plastic bottles because they want to avoid BPA leeching jntk their drink. Switching to a can lined with BPA doesn’t seem to help the issue at all.
Honestly, not much that can be done other than voicing concerns to your representatives. Thankfully, here in EU a resolution has been passed earlier this year banning BPA and other bisphenols. Hopefully it gets put into action soon.
I hope to emigrate to the EU one day. To be blunt, we do not have our shit together over here…
Honestly, it’s not much better here. But better.
At least the aluminium shields it from sunlight. Maybe that mean less leeching?
Isn’t “BPA-free” a selling point for food-safe plastic because BPA is bad?
Yes, but the problem is they replaced it with BPS which is basically the same, but less tested.
They have plastic coating, yes, but way less plastic and way easier to just burn it off in the crucible.
Plastic burns easily in all types of fires.
Oh yeah let me just whip out my interdimensional crucible and burn off the plastic between the liquid and the metal so I can drink my beverage in peace.
That’s like saying cars and trucks are made of paint because they have a layer of it on the outside.
Can liners are both an extremely small portion of the overall container as well as being absolutely essential for most canned beverages.
Additionally, many/most manufacturers have or are moving away from liner materials that contain BPA.
You mean, if it gets recycled.
Right, 90%-ish of it never gets recycled at all, and the stuff that does can only go through the process a handful of times before it’s unusable.
EDIT: dude was talking about plastic recycling, i misunderstood the context
Original comment:
🧢
50% of beer and soda cans are recycled
And,
Why post blatantly false, easily invalidated information?
Me, and I’m pretty sure the guy I was replying to, were both talking about plastic recycling, not aluminum recycling, replying to OP statement: I am currently trying to avoid using plastic packed drinks as much as possible due to it’s limited and finite recycle count.
Sorry, I thought that was clear from the context.
I buy distilled water for my daughter’s baby formula bottles. They all come in plastic jugs and I really wish I could just bring a glass jar somewhere to get it refilled. Because I just know all that plastic is leeching into the water.
It’s a shame that glass jars are so uncommon around here. The plastic is so wasteful.
The question of chemicals leeching from plastic into food has been studied and largely solved.
Money. Plastic is so integrated into the supply chain that divesting from it would require retooling probably thousands of bottling plants, at significant expense, with no guarantee of ROI.
Increase the costs by adding taxes to the plastic that account. Sucks to use the stick instead of the carrot, but if it’s a real societal cost then the cost should be paid by those introducing it. They’d raise prices for these goods and consumers can decide if it’s still worth buying.
Then give a loan to a worker co-op that would like to take over and force THAT sale to happen. That way the everything is equally shared amongst the workers, diffusing the wealth and power into the working class.
Not the vast majority going to some billionaires looking to undermine the very nation they were founded.
My thought is that it’s incredible how enormous the packaged drink market is. Tap water + filter + insulated bottle. Profit.
I understand that not everyone has the luxury of planning ahead but the drink market should be less than half of what it is today. Most people drink bottled drinks because of marketing and subliminal pressures and habits.
There are alternatives to plastic. As stupidly expensive as it is, Liquid Death is water in a can. I’ve also seen water in paper cartons and larger bottles made of glass. Soda is available in cans as well. Teas and juices are available in glass. You may be choosing to drink a particular brand that’s only available in plastic.
You have plenty of choices. You have the choice to drink a particular product out of plastic. You have the choice to not drink that. You may be faced with having to pay a little more or to drink something that’s not your favorite. In an ideal world, more people would spend a little more on their purchases to increase demand for the manufacturing of a product which could bring prices down while decreasing demand and manufacturing of popular packaging.
I’m an Uber driver and I buy so many bottled drinks. My plan is to just get like two or three liter bottles to keep in the car to hydrate me for the day off tap water from home.
Mostly just to save myself money though. Gotta get a buffer built and I’m just barely making it now.
I love that you’ve recognized an opportunity for improvement and established a reasonable solution.
Carbonated drinks are tough but if you’re looking for something other than water, make some iced tea from scratch or from powered form or fruit juice from concentrate - anything you can buy in bulk - to keep in insulated bottles.
We have saturated our environment with aluminum to the point where one of our “background ailments” is light metal poisoning from aluminum - most notably as a decline in intelligence. We keep ‘choosing’ the cheapest easiest solution to liquids packaging and distribution - and each one of them - EXCEPT GLASS - has come back to bite us on the ass.
Do you have any sources for this fairly common naturally occurring
biologically important, and in human uses bioinert metal causing “light metal poisoning” from either natural background doses or incidental from human pollution?I don’t want acute poisoning, specifically sources on chronic background doses.
Since when is aluminium biologically important? I’m under the impression that humans (and other life?) do not need aluminium at all.
Having said that, my info is that it’s nothing to worry about. It is very common in food (naturally and since forever), and the body can get rid of it, and they haven’t been able to show adverse effects except in very very high doses. That’s the messaging I’ve been seeing anyway.
You’re in fact right, I was hedging a bet that the abundance of aluminum meant it’d be used by some random metabolic processes somewhere, which it probably is, but still none found.
So they disproved the aluminium-alzheimers link? I knew it was Just Fine to make the instant coffee from the water used to boil the meal packets.
This sounds like one of those Facebook facts…
As others have said, source?
Aluminum is the fifth most common element on Earth, and is naturally present in pretty large quantities in soil.
Are you sure you aren’t confusing it with lead?
No. Lead is another though. Aluminum isn’t common at all because it’s locked up in bauxite, which must be refined in order to ‘release’ the aluminum content.
The world has done an excellent job of releasing aluminum from it’s ‘prison’, and now aluminum is “loose” and causing problems with human cognitive abilities. (actually, all animals - but it’s hard to notice a decline in mental ability in animals).
Light metal’s poisoning, radioactive fallout from over 5,000 nuclear explosions, lead, CO2, decline in O2 atmospheric content… we’ve caused ourselves to start devolving.
Someone needs to invent amorphous silicon with weak bonds and call it “glasstic”
You know cans are just plastic sacs using the tin/aluminum for structure right?
Very little plastic, which burns when they recycle the cans
Yes it burns. Just like the plastic bottle do when put into the incinerator.
1/20th of the plastic burns though… And the aluminum is 100% recyclable. So not quite “just like”.
There must be more to it than this. As a Dr. Pepper connoisseur I can tell you that Dr. Pepper from a can tastes far superior than from a bottle.
It’s a different type of plastic, AFAIK it’s like a spray on polymer for the aluminum cans; But I think the biggest factor is probably UV degradation of the ingredients in the soda with the clear plastic bottles.
It’s a different type of plastic because it doesn’t need to be structural. Plastic bottles use PET, cans use a variety but I’m commonly seeing BPA.
Maybe it’s for the same reason Moscow Mules are served in copper mugs. The container conducts heat well and therefore feels very cold to the touch when you put your lips on it, which enhances the feeling of it being refreshing.
Moscow Mules are served in copper mugs
…which ideally are not copper on the inside to prevent copper from leaching into the acidic beverage you’re drinking.
Honestly same for seltzer/club soda
That says more about the taste of Dr Pepper than it does about the cans 😂
That’s just one example. Back when I still drank soda, I’d take a coke, pepsi, or mt dew in a can over a bottle any day for the same reason.
That’s pretty disingenuous, considering the amounts of respective materials involved.
By that rationale, your home is made of paint. It just uses wood and concrete for structure.
We have a water company here that sells water in cans called Liquid Death, I don’t know if they are international or not.
We also have beer companies that use aluminum bottles over cans, might just be Bud Light and Coors but I dont drink cheap pilsners.
We don’t recycle enough and don’t have the capacity for processing if we did recycle enough. There is no real financial incentive for companies to spend more on aluminum bottles vs cans or plastic. Aluminum bottles have a plastic liner because drinking out of raw aluminum tastes bad and might contribute to Alzheimer’s(might not be true).
I want us to go back to glass bottles but we stopped using them so much because we are terrible people and leave broken glass everywhere and plastic is better for shareholders. Seriously, we we were using glass the amount of broken glass shards in parks, streets, sidewalks, parking lots was a problem when I was a kid.
We don’t recycle enough
Maybe if recycling wasn’t a massive joke it might be useful and people might embrace it.
The reality is no matter how much effort you put into recycling it’s going to a landfill or incinerator.
“Recycling” outside of glass bottles is essentially non existent.
The answer is to stop producing plastic.
I was under the impression that only plastic Recycling was a sham and Recycling glass, cans and cardboard was good.
Ya but it isn’t the cans, glass bottles, and cardboard that’s causing permanent environmental damage. It’s plastic that we are manufacturing daily all for it to wind up in a landfill and the side of the road which finds its way into rivers, lakes , oceans and pretty much everywhere else.
The lack of recycling glass isn’t what’s killing us. It’s plastic.
The majority of the aluminum in circulation in the US is recycled. It’s significantly more than even glass and paper. The reason is because it’s much cheaper to use recycled aluminum than raw.
But you’re right when it comes to plastic.
If you’re talking about the US, then you have to spell it the way we spell it.
Lol true, Aluminum
I refuse to buy mineral water because of this. Only in emergency mode.
I always carry my reusable bottle (Tupperware) wherever I go.
soda stream and salts.
Same. The most recent time I bought a plastic bottle was on a recent holiday for a week-long car trip away from home in a country where tap water was not drinkable. I was happy to see they had big 10-liter bottles in the shop so I could refill my reusable water bottle during the whole trip.
Do you mean in things like plastic water bottles or other beverage containers like plastic bottles containing soda?
Yeah. Beverage bottles
Well when it comes to water I feel like it has a lot to do with corporate events and advertising. If you are in Florida for example and the water tastes like it’s been filtered with dead fish you might be more inclined to grab a bottle.
As for soda I think it has a lot to do with the cost of using glass bottles. People don’t really get them refilled. They just recycle them.
But that’s how it ia supposed to work, you drop them off at the place where you buy new stuff. They get them refilled and restocked.
Yeah but I feel like that died out with cocaine in Coca Cola for the most part at least in the US
Aluminum is fine if you’re going to pour your drink into a glass, but despite the plastic inner sleeve you’re still going to taste the metal edge if you sip from the can.
Imo glass bottle is king. Then can, then plastic bottle if I’m in the middle of the Mojave desert having walked for 3 days with absolutely no form of hydration and am literally on the cusp of death. It tastes like shit and is bad for environment; not recyclable. Fuck plastic bottles.
As a klutz, with stupid tile floors I can’t afford to replace, I have come to appreciate plastic cups. Only having to clean up the spilled liquid, not deal with trying to protect kids and cats and my feet and hands as I scramble to get every shard, is worth the flatness of flavor.
Huh guess I like aluminum. I think soda from cans is far better than plastic
Cans transfer heat better too, so you feel the cold in your hand as you drink.
I know a lot of people who prefer Pepsi out of a tin. I know I definitely prefer coke (cola) out of a tin.
I think I would agree although I don’t really like cola. The can adds a tang which works with it.
